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Monday, October 21, 2013

Who Knew That "5 Little Pumpkins" Could Be So Much FUN?

FUN, FUN, FUN! Thanks to Heidi, from Heidi's Songs, for her GrEaT idea:

Use Pool Noodles to create pumpkins!

Each pumpkin was unique!

What We Did:

I sliced off a piece of a pool noodle and we used it as a stamp to stamp 5 orange circles on our gate.
It was the 40th day of school, so it was perfect since it looked just like an orange zero!
The pool noodle also created a nice texture when we lifted the paint up off of the paper.

How We Did It:

The students cut out a simple gate which was printed on brown construction paper. You can also just give them 2 long strips of brown construction paper (1" X 10") for the gate rails and 2 short strips (1" X 5") for the gate posts.

They glued their gate to a piece of blue construction paper for a daytime setting or a piece of black construction paper for a nighttime setting. (A great way to integrate the setting of a story into your project.)

These mouths looked a lot like Ws. Blue background meant daytime.

We poured a bit of orange tempra on a paper plate and used the slice of the pool noodle to dip into the paint and stamp five pumpkins on the gate. You can also paint the orange paint onto the pool noodle slice before stamping.

The next day, I gave each child 5 wide mouths that kind of looked like wide Ws. I made them by stacking 5 pieces of black construction paper cut to 1/2" X 2". I trimmed the sides so the rectangles looked like trapezoids.

Then I snipped out two triangles from the top and one from the bottom.
Some came out a little wider with 3 triangles cut out of the top and 2 out of the bottom.

These mouths looked wider than a W. Black background meant it was nighttime.

I placed the 5 "W" shaped mouths and all of the scraps of triangles on each child's workspace. They glued the mouths to each of the dried pumpkins and had lots of triangles to create eyes and noses.
I also gave them each a small piece of green construction paper to create five stems or vines.

The entrance to our "TK"AKA: The Kingdom! :)

They also got to glue the poem to the gate. Don't they look cute on and around my door?

Sets of 5 pumpkins sat on the gates just outside of"The Kingdom"

I still have the rest of the pool noodle to use for other great projects.
I think I'll do this with the rest of the green pool noodle:

I am so doing this!

If you made "5 Little Pumpkins Sitting on a Gate," let us know how YOU did it!

Awwww, Heidi, you are the BEST! Thank you for getting me into pool noodles. I found one for 25 cents at a garage sale while up at Mammoth Mountain a few weeks ago at the fly fishing fair. You should have seen the look on my husband's face when I showed up with a pool noodle. We don't have a pool, so he was super confused and was wondering where we were going to put this thing for the long drive home. I just told him, "Heidi just posted about a cute project I can do with a pool noodle!" :oD After 40 years, he has just learned to not even ask questions. :oDPalma